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Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" The article references a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed eit

by cujo 6y ago

Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" The article references a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed either. This isn't much. "In general, people’s confidence in their leaders declined after getting 3g. However, the size of this effect varied. It was smaller in countries that allow a free press than in ones where traditional media are muzzled, and bigger in countries with unlimited web browsing than in ones that censor the internet. This implies that people are most likely to turn against their governments when they are exposed to online criticism that is not present offline. The decline was also larger in rural areas than in cities." They bang on the 3g access, but gloss over the rural vs urban part. It could be reframed to something like "people who are isolated from information are less likely to question their assumptions about their government."

zepearl 6y ago
> Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" I agree. I think as well that nowadays we're at a crossroads: we get many more informations than in the past AND at the same time we can dedicate less time to evaluate those informations (because we have to dedicate more time to digest all those extra inbound informations => circular cause/effect?). Interesting times & theme (& complicated discussion) - going to be interesting to see how this turns out, if people will find a good way to deal with this. I just hope that humanity won't fall into any kind of extremes.
EliRivers 6y ago
"People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" Is that true? I see a lot more people trusting blindly in batshit crazy nonsense than I used to, and they seem to be getting it through constant feeds on their phones.
mhoad 6y ago
“People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly“ seems like an odd takeaway without also talking about the firehose of misinformation that is social media.
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  Valid point. I think there are two totally different reasons it could erode trust in whatever ideas were in wide circulation before the introduction of the new medium: (1) People could get better at critical thinking. This is a kind of enlightenment. Enlightenment usually requires effort, so it's not automatic. But some people will seize the opportunity that they didn't otherwise have. (2) People are just exposed to more ideas. They don't take the (old) default views anymore because now there are more choices readily available to them. This can happen without people getting smarter. The paths of least resistance have been rearranged.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  It is my experience that the people who are most susceptible to misinformation are the same ones who where uninterested in valid info about Gov wrongdoing.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  I think the agrument is against slanting the conclusion as creating distrust without significant evidence. Voting out incumbents does not necessarily equate to lack of faith. Less people voting would indicate lack of faith, yes? Perhaps the better headline is: "Status quo incumbents (who have lost track of market forces) more likely to lose to internet savvy challengers when internet is introduced"?
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though. Or a chance of knowing what you were taught in school was wrong or biased (I was taught that the civil war wasn't really about slavery and that Hawaii really wanted to be part of the US without mentioning the colonialism bits, for example). Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your school teacher, it was much harder to find an alternative storyline, even if you question the truthfulness of something. Now, I know folks are believing the misinformation, but to be fair, so many of us weren't taught how to sort out this stuff in school. The internet existed for me in high school, though we didn't have it at home save for a short time with dial up. My sister, 6 years younger, had internet most of the time she was in school and my brother, 11 years younger, had internet for most, if not all, of his teenage years. Schools hadn't updated curriculum all that much in no small part because the teachers weren't as internet savvy as the children. Attitudes ranged from "no internet sources" to "no wikipedia" but not so many restrictions outside of that. Entire generations of folks have had to just figure it out on their own, and some of us haven't taken the road of truth.
Juliate 6y ago
Or "People with access to more information but with less education how to discriminate and make something of it become less likely to trust anyone." The issue is not that people get manipulated into believing this or that side. It's that they don't trust anyone anymore. So they rally what they like, or what they fear less. Reminds me also this tweet from a few days ago: "Expanding upon Hannah Arendt’s “common present”, Pankaj Mishra wrote in his “Age of Anger” that globalisation & internet has placed societies & individuals around the globe in a common present whereas these societies & individuals had very different & diverse pasts (n)" https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288 https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288
baybal2 6y ago
I will call this a "Elzin Effect": — When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake — Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA. — It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops: — “He commented that if the Soviet people, who often must wait in line for goods, saw U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution.’ ” The Internet lets people experience pretty much the same, except do so while being on the other side of the public/government divide, and in fact, there are revolutions happening. What I myself believe that a lot of people in the West kind of realise how this work in basics, but only the people who grew in the unfree world will continue further to note that what matters even more is what he said later: — “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said. Elzin was said to be almost crying from this realisation. He saw it's impossible to recover the control of the party when, in a few years, it will be not only him, but tens of thousands of other USSR's officials visiting USA. The later made themselves to feel that they look like clowns in eyes of people who been there, and saw this. These officials will forever stop believing in the power of CPSU, because they saw who really have all the wealth, power, and political potency in this world. Those officials will stop wanting to be high ranking functionaries, and will want to do business themselves in hopes of achieving even a tiny fraction of wealth they saw in the USA, or even drop everything, and move to the West themselves (A huge portion of Russian immigration to the Brighton Beach in early nineties were, in fact, families of Soviet officials, and other elites.) Above, was what the third man in the power vertical, in the second most powerful world country at the time said. Now, imagine how much will this crash the worldview of some "big guy" official in a small town, or a village in the third world, and how they will feel. They too will stop caring for their duties, cash out the treasury, and run. The Internet is equally potent in erasing the faith in the government of both the governed, and the ones doing governing.
- netsharc 6y ago
  At least Yeltsin's (why Elzin?) observations are probably quite accurate. But nowadays it seems like people are getting mad based on partial information (sometimes just 140 characters) or lies and misinformation. For example the paranoia against Muslims is based on incorrect perceptions of how many Muslims there are: https://www.statista.com/statistics/952909/perceptions-on-religion-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/952909/perceptions-on-re... , and this on top of the perception that having Muslims in the community is a negative thing. Maybe it's also a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" or "in the future". US voters heard Obama's message of hope and attached to it everything they wanted to be better in their lives. And the same with Trump's message of "Great Again".
Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
Don't assume the information is good or correct or the full story.
inglor_cz 6y ago
It is also possible that people in rural areas tend to have less contact with the government in general - after all, most government activity takes place in the capital and other big cities. And in absence of contact, people do not really have strong opinions. But once information arrives, things change. Prior to mass media, few Americans would be strongly opinionated on the internal dealings of Washington D.C. Simply said, they never set their foot there and the distant federal government was not a major influence in their lives. With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it.
- FpUser 6y ago
  >"With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it." Problem with this is that modern reporting is so f..d up that the picture they paint often has little to do with reality. Instead of trying to adequately address the reality media is trying create one and / or doing plain propaganda.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  I don't know. Rural areas have farms, and there are plenty of government regulations about farming - and your money is tied to these. Government is less convenient too: Just a trip to the DMV or courthouse might take 30-60 minutes of driving. I think the parent was correct: Cities tend to have more diverse populations. Rural areas tend to have less, which means less folks to challenge your notions of the world (and more chance that you'll write some of the folks off that do so).
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    And pretty much all developed nations have subsidy programs for farmers who are a well organised political bloc.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Farmers can also signal honestly when demonstrating. Hoodies and backpacks may be cheap, but it's much less likely anyone would acquire a whole tractor even if they wished to discredit a farmers' protest.
_visgean 6y ago
You are ignoring thatthere are active campaigns to spread misinformation.
agumonkey 6y ago
I'd question the notion of information, and how it used to be before free high bandwidth communications compared to now. I feel we're sinking in a flood of noise dressed as information. There's more doubts and paradox of choice at every level. Add to this the fact that most people have only access to 'some' information .. they're not informed about some principles (like the paradox of choice) and will not be able to filter or integrate that much thus react on wrong information. The old system was foggy and absolute truth was surely impossible but it feels structurally more sound to me.
x87678r 6y ago
I think about this a lot, esp with wars. In the old days it seemed easy to get everyone to sign up and attack some other country where now people are more likely to know someone from other countries/races/religions and get to see what is actually happening.
AlexandrB 6y ago
> Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" This is contradicted in dramatic fashion by the QAnon movement. People are happy to trust just as blindly, they're just trusting different people.
xtiansimon 6y ago
> “Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly"” Alternate headline: “Higher meme transmission rates strengthen cultural immune systems”

by cujo 6y ago

zepearl 6y ago

> Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" I agree. I think as well that nowadays we're at a crossroads: we get many more informations than in the past AND at the same time we can dedicate less time to evaluate those informations (because we have to dedicate more time to digest all those extra inbound informations => circular cause/effect?). Interesting times & theme (& complicated discussion) - going to be interesting to see how this turns out, if people will find a good way to deal with this. I just hope that humanity won't fall into any kind of extremes.

EliRivers 6y ago

"People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" Is that true? I see a lot more people trusting blindly in batshit crazy nonsense than I used to, and they seem to be getting it through constant feeds on their phones.

mhoad 6y ago

“People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly“ seems like an odd takeaway without also talking about the firehose of misinformation that is social media.

adrianmonk 6y ago
Valid point. I think there are two totally different reasons it could erode trust in whatever ideas were in wide circulation before the introduction of the new medium: (1) People could get better at critical thinking. This is a kind of enlightenment. Enlightenment usually requires effort, so it's not automatic. But some people will seize the opportunity that they didn't otherwise have. (2) People are just exposed to more ideas. They don't take the (old) default views anymore because now there are more choices readily available to them. This can happen without people getting smarter. The paths of least resistance have been rearranged.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
It is my experience that the people who are most susceptible to misinformation are the same ones who where uninterested in valid info about Gov wrongdoing.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
I think the agrument is against slanting the conclusion as creating distrust without significant evidence. Voting out incumbents does not necessarily equate to lack of faith. Less people voting would indicate lack of faith, yes? Perhaps the better headline is: "Status quo incumbents (who have lost track of market forces) more likely to lose to internet savvy challengers when internet is introduced"?
Broken_Hippo 6y ago
With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though. Or a chance of knowing what you were taught in school was wrong or biased (I was taught that the civil war wasn't really about slavery and that Hawaii really wanted to be part of the US without mentioning the colonialism bits, for example). Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your school teacher, it was much harder to find an alternative storyline, even if you question the truthfulness of something. Now, I know folks are believing the misinformation, but to be fair, so many of us weren't taught how to sort out this stuff in school. The internet existed for me in high school, though we didn't have it at home save for a short time with dial up. My sister, 6 years younger, had internet most of the time she was in school and my brother, 11 years younger, had internet for most, if not all, of his teenage years. Schools hadn't updated curriculum all that much in no small part because the teachers weren't as internet savvy as the children. Attitudes ranged from "no internet sources" to "no wikipedia" but not so many restrictions outside of that. Entire generations of folks have had to just figure it out on their own, and some of us haven't taken the road of truth.

Juliate 6y ago

Or "People with access to more information but with less education how to discriminate and make something of it become less likely to trust anyone." The issue is not that people get manipulated into believing this or that side. It's that they don't trust anyone anymore. So they rally what they like, or what they fear less. Reminds me also this tweet from a few days ago: "Expanding upon Hannah Arendt’s “common present”, Pankaj Mishra wrote in his “Age of Anger” that globalisation & internet has placed societies & individuals around the globe in a common present whereas these societies & individuals had very different & diverse pasts (n)" https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288 https://twitter.com/SaadSaeed2/status/1313939341912076288

baybal2 6y ago

I will call this a "Elzin Effect": — When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake — Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA. — It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops: — “He commented that if the Soviet people, who often must wait in line for goods, saw U.S. supermarkets, ‘there would be a revolution.’ ” The Internet lets people experience pretty much the same, except do so while being on the other side of the public/government divide, and in fact, there are revolutions happening. What I myself believe that a lot of people in the West kind of realise how this work in basics, but only the people who grew in the unfree world will continue further to note that what matters even more is what he said later: — “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said. Elzin was said to be almost crying from this realisation. He saw it's impossible to recover the control of the party when, in a few years, it will be not only him, but tens of thousands of other USSR's officials visiting USA. The later made themselves to feel that they look like clowns in eyes of people who been there, and saw this. These officials will forever stop believing in the power of CPSU, because they saw who really have all the wealth, power, and political potency in this world. Those officials will stop wanting to be high ranking functionaries, and will want to do business themselves in hopes of achieving even a tiny fraction of wealth they saw in the USA, or even drop everything, and move to the West themselves (A huge portion of Russian immigration to the Brighton Beach in early nineties were, in fact, families of Soviet officials, and other elites.) Above, was what the third man in the power vertical, in the second most powerful world country at the time said. Now, imagine how much will this crash the worldview of some "big guy" official in a small town, or a village in the third world, and how they will feel. They too will stop caring for their duties, cash out the treasury, and run. The Internet is equally potent in erasing the faith in the government of both the governed, and the ones doing governing.

netsharc 6y ago
At least Yeltsin's (why Elzin?) observations are probably quite accurate. But nowadays it seems like people are getting mad based on partial information (sometimes just 140 characters) or lies and misinformation. For example the paranoia against Muslims is based on incorrect perceptions of how many Muslims there are: https://www.statista.com/statistics/952909/perceptions-on-religion-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/952909/perceptions-on-re... , and this on top of the perception that having Muslims in the community is a negative thing. Maybe it's also a lot of the "grass is greener on the other side" or "in the future". US voters heard Obama's message of hope and attached to it everything they wanted to be better in their lives. And the same with Trump's message of "Great Again".

Wolfenstein98k 6y ago

Don't assume the information is good or correct or the full story.

inglor_cz 6y ago

It is also possible that people in rural areas tend to have less contact with the government in general - after all, most government activity takes place in the capital and other big cities. And in absence of contact, people do not really have strong opinions. But once information arrives, things change. Prior to mass media, few Americans would be strongly opinionated on the internal dealings of Washington D.C. Simply said, they never set their foot there and the distant federal government was not a major influence in their lives. With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it.

FpUser 6y ago
>"With the contemporary news cycle, Washington D.C. feels very close and familiar, even to me, a Czech residing an ocean away from it." Problem with this is that modern reporting is so f..d up that the picture they paint often has little to do with reality. Instead of trying to adequately address the reality media is trying create one and / or doing plain propaganda.
Broken_Hippo 6y ago
I don't know. Rural areas have farms, and there are plenty of government regulations about farming - and your money is tied to these. Government is less convenient too: Just a trip to the DMV or courthouse might take 30-60 minutes of driving. I think the parent was correct: Cities tend to have more diverse populations. Rural areas tend to have less, which means less folks to challenge your notions of the world (and more chance that you'll write some of the folks off that do so).
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  And pretty much all developed nations have subsidy programs for farmers who are a well organised political bloc.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Farmers can also signal honestly when demonstrating. Hoodies and backpacks may be cheap, but it's much less likely anyone would acquire a whole tractor even if they wished to discredit a farmers' protest.

_visgean 6y ago

You are ignoring thatthere are active campaigns to spread misinformation.

agumonkey 6y ago

I'd question the notion of information, and how it used to be before free high bandwidth communications compared to now. I feel we're sinking in a flood of noise dressed as information. There's more doubts and paradox of choice at every level. Add to this the fact that most people have only access to 'some' information .. they're not informed about some principles (like the paradox of choice) and will not be able to filter or integrate that much thus react on wrong information. The old system was foggy and absolute truth was surely impossible but it feels structurally more sound to me.

x87678r 6y ago

I think about this a lot, esp with wars. In the old days it seemed easy to get everyone to sign up and attack some other country where now people are more likely to know someone from other countries/races/religions and get to see what is actually happening.

AlexandrB 6y ago

> Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly" This is contradicted in dramatic fashion by the QAnon movement. People are happy to trust just as blindly, they're just trusting different people.

xtiansimon 6y ago

> “Alternate headline: "People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly"” Alternate headline: “Higher meme transmission rates strengthen cultural immune systems”